Members of SmartVault plans, including Standard, Accounting Pro, Accounting Unlimited, and Business Pro, can use SmartVault's full-text search capabilities to search for specific words within uploaded Microsoft documents like Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files.

You can also use full-text search to locate words within PDF documents, as long as it is a searchable PDF.

How Full-Text Search Works with PDFs

For SmartVault to find words within a PDF, the document must be created as a searchable PDF. Here’s how this works:

• Automatically Searchable PDFs: Many PDF documents, such as those saved from Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat, are automatically created as searchable PDFs.
• Scanned PDFs: PDFs created directly from a scanner may or may not be searchable. If your scanner uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, it will produce a searchable PDF. A PDF that is simply a scanned image without OCR is not searchable by keywords.

    Tip

  To ensure your scanned PDFs are searchable, enable OCR in your scanner's software. Most scanners, including TWAIN-compliant and Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, can enable OCR. Check your scanner's documentation for details, or see Creating SmartVault ScanSnap Profiles for Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanners for specific guidance.

Benefits of Full-Text Search in SmartVault

Full-text search lets you quickly find important documents by searching for keywords within the content. Any Microsoft Office document, such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file, is automatically indexed in SmartVault after upload. Once indexing is complete, you can use keywords from within the document's body to locate it in your SmartVault account.

Things to Consider

Testing the process within your workflow is a good idea before you rely on OCR or searchable documents for full-text searching. OCR can add time to the scanning process, so testing will help you decide if it fits your needs well.